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Author's manuscript/typescript, 21pp. 8vo, with his numerous corrections and alterations throughout; printer's proofs, 19pp., printed rectos only, with Alan Anderson's manuscript corrections on five pages, and the Tragara Press-printed prospectus for the book, single sheet, slightly creased and with one small mark, printing on the verso the poem "Come deceptions of each kind". Wartime poems reprinted in the evening of the author's life by his "oldest friend", Alan Anderson of the Tragara Press; the bookseller George Sims had been the press's "first customer" in 1954. Sixteen Poems was published in an edition of 85 numbered and 15 lettered copies; its original title, evidently, was "Ten Poems", and the author intended an epigraph, L.P. Hartley's "The past is a foreign country - they do things differently there". First a poet, and quite widely published, George Sims (1923-1999) became an antiquarian bookseller and then a writer of well-received crime fiction. "Come deceptions of each kind: / Those of gulls who whirl through / Frail snowfall taste of / Sea's spiced breath upon my window, / Then ease themselves upon tumbling, / With senseless cry celebrating / This world's terror / Those of thin thrush, sick / With cold, balanced on bare stick, / Piping of neglected hedges thick / With rose and cream-lipped honeysuckle. / Old crows, thrown like scraps away / In this grey hour of day / Make your tuneless cry your only song, / Bring forth your unsteady young, / Come, deceptions of Springkind.". Seller Inventory # 32M100459
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